The place for me to turn abstract stuff into concrete (!).

Reader bgbuffalo was so kind to point out that my macro package for simplifying GTD with Outlook 2007, Lean GTD 2007, didn’t work with Outlook 2010. It’d be a bonus if it did, of course! So, although I don’t yet have Outlook 2010, we worked together to get a version that could execute in Outlook 2010. Thanks!

As a result, I’ve commented two lines in the code that should be removed in order to get it to work. The backside is that you won’t get email attachments to tasks and appointments, only the text itself in the notes. But those disappear in sync anyway, so that’s not such a big issue. So if you want to use the macros with Outlook 2010, remove those two lines. (Search for “Outlook 2010″ in the code.)

Please drop me a note if you know how to properly attach emails to tasks and appointments in Outlook 2010 VBA; then I’d be able to fix this properly.

I’ve uploaded an updated version of my Outlook GTD macro package Lean GTD 2007. The main feature is that I’ve added another button, that simplifies the work of adding an “all day” event without a reminder.

I’ve also made the installation easier: now it removes any previous command bar, and always installs a new one.

I’ve just created a new webpage for my Outlook 2007 GTD macro package, instead of just maintaining it in its original blog post from 2006. I’d recommend anyone using Outlook 2007 and David Allen‘s GTD methodology to try it out! It simplifies most basic operations significantly, to a very low price (that is, completely free). What I like most about it is that it doesn’t add lots of complexity, like handling dependencies between projects and actions, and in that way, everything can be synced to your mobile phone and to another computer without losing important information.

Just head over there or download it right away! Instructions are inside the .bas file.

Finally, I got enough of the instability of LapLink’s PDASync software, uninstalled it, and installed the trial version of Chapura‘s PocketMirror software. PocketMirror appears to use the synchronization mechanism of ActiveSync (or WMDC on Vista) itself, and adds the ability to sync different folders in Outlook to categories on your Windows Mobile PDA. Very stable so far, so I’ll probably buy it. Works very well on my work computer, too, where I can put my private stuff in a separate .pst file, and the work stuff on the Exchange Server. You can also choose not to put any private stuff at all on the work computer.

This prompted me to update my GTD macros for Outlook 2007. The previous version always created tasks in the default folder, but now, tasks are created in the same folder as the task you’re standing on. So you can create work tasks as easily as private tasks. Previously I had all tasks in one folder, setting a certain category on the work tasks, letting PDASync filter on it for the work computer. Download here!

Nick Malik writes about how to make agile software development processes scale up to larger projects. How? Through an agile architecture! Nice to read. Of course there are other complications, too, but this is an essential one.

This is promising; finally the Tasks that have previously appeared in Gmail as a Labs feature has appeared permanently in Google Calendar. What remains now for me to use that feature is that I can sync the tasks to my Windows Mobile phone. OggSync, are you doing anything about this? One challenge is of course that Google tasks are hierarchical, and Outlook tasks are not.

My blog has been inaccessible today, first due to a failure in ZoneEdit’s DNS records, then to me changing DNS host to GoDaddy, where I host the domain for the blog. Several years ago, when I set up the this blog, GoDaddy didn’t have the required functionality for subdomains, as I wrote about back then, but now I realized that this wasn’t a problem anymore. So things should be up and running again!

You can’t ignore that now, you can use Gmail in offline mode, with the help of Google Gears. I’m still using Outlook for offline email, but it’ll be interesting to see how the Google offering develops. With the recent introduction of tasks to Gmail, they’re close to being a complete productivity solution. If only those tasks could be synced to my phone, I believe I’d stop using Outlook.